


Sheldon of the Lens

by Ankaret



Category: Big Bang Theory, Lensman series - Smith
Genre: Asexual Character, Crossover, Gen, Humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-03
Updated: 2010-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-08 16:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'"On the beam and on the green, Dr. Cooper," she breathed to herself through softly parted red lips, "<i>all</i> the way." '</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sheldon of the Lens

There was a woman in Sheldon Cooper's room. Her red hair was arranged in a peculiar but not unattractive gem-studded beehive which reminded Sheldon comfortingly of Original Trek: the first series, not any of its inferior successors, and certainly not the remake, which Sheldon had only watched in order to critique the special effects. Her figure was a genetic outlier, and not in the 'surely not even a particularly diseased Cro-Magnon could be as naturally scrawny as Leslie Winkle' sense.

A showy bracelet glittered at her wrist. Sheldon found himself oddly fascinated by the structure of its central disk, which reminded him of the bark of the common Carboniferous fossilised _Lepidodendron_. The rest of her costume was scanty verging on nonexistent.

Even more distressing than her lack of warm, socially acceptable clothing was her presence at all. In his room. People couldn't _be_ in Sheldon's room. He thought he'd made that abundantly clear.

"You can't be in my room," said Sheldon in an agitated voice.

"It is starkly improbable that any member of a civilisation at this low stage of development should have previously experienced the reality of hyperspatial tube transference," agreed the woman, adjusting the scanty swathe of sparkling fabric about her hips. "Nevertheless, I am here, and therefore you, Dr. Cooper, must logically agree that it is not impossible."

"I didn't say it was impossible," said Sheldon, sitting up in bed. "I said that you couldn't be here. It's a non-reciprocal social agreement that I have with the rest of the human race, and I should like you to honor it."

"I'm not a member of the human race," she said, and sat on the bed. Sheldon scrabbled his legs away from her with appalled and insectile dexterity.

This, he thought, should really not be happening. Presumably the woman was some drunken friend of Penny's. Sheldon wondered with distressed fascination whether she was a friend of Penny's who failed to meet the intellectual requirements to work at the Cheesecake Factory and had therefore been forced to take up a living as an exotic dancer. Perhaps she had trouble memorising lists.

"You shouldn't do yourself down," he said as kindly as was in him at 3 am when there was an unauthorised stranger in his room. "The human race has _very_ low entry requirements."

"And I exceed 'em all," she said confidently. "As do you, Slick. All of my predictions suggested that your mentality was stable at the third level of stress, and I'm no slouch with a slide-rule."

"Is that a slide-rule hidden rather badly under the side-knot of your..." Sheldon waved a distracted hand at her item of clothing, which he was not sure deserved the dignity of the name _skirt_. "If you wanted to disguise it more efficiently you should have considered a fabric with a better thread count."

"Nope. I'm just starkly pleased to see you." The woman unholstered something that Sheldon could only describe as a ray-gun from her hip. It had little rings-of-Saturn detailing around its barrel, and a decal of some kind of reptilian creature in a come-hither pose on the stock. "It's a DeLameter Mk. 2. My father made me bring it along in case your local zwilniks got rowdy."

The bedroom door opened. "Sheldon, do you have a _woman_ in there?" enquired Leonard blearily, rubbing his glasses on the sleeve of his chenille bathrobe.

The woman boosted herself lithely to her feet and snapped to attention. "You better believe it, soldier. Name's Karen Kinnison. Any colleague or assistant..."

"I always felt _trained monkey_ would be the most accurate description, but Leonard wouldn't let me put it on his office door," muttered Sheldon.

"Any friend of Dr. Cooper is all QX with me. Shake." Karen twirled the DeLameter in her hand and holstered it in order to pump Leonard's hand enthusiastically. Sheldon winced.

"What's your problem?" said Leonard in a tone of voice that was both sleep-deprived and suggestive of not having forgiven the trained monkey comment. "I'm the one who's counting my fingers."

"I'm from Texas," said Sheldon prissily. "Firearm safety is something of which I was made conscious from a very early age."

Karen knocked the heel of her hand against her forehead. "Of course! I'd forgotten that at your stage of development, even the strength of a near-optimal male would be comparatively and embarrassingly puny."

"Don't feel bad," Sheldon advised her kindly. "He's been called puny by people with much better social adjustment than you."

Leonard decided that entering into this conversation at all would only be something he would regret. He looked her costume up and down instead, doing his best to be a gentleman and only look at the costume rather than the smooth and distractingly curvaceous areas of lack of costume in between.

"Sheldon, I think we're in one of Wolowitz's dreams," he said plaintively, polishing his glasses again. "I don't really like it here and I'm worried that this woman's about to turn into his mother and then devour us like so many plates of brisket."

"You're thinking of Grendel," said Sheldon kindly.

Leonard risked another look. He had a terrible feeling that he just ought to wake Penny up and tell her to slap him now. Why, oh why, had he spent so many of his furtive teenage years reading Heinlein books featuring steatopygous redheads, inside the dustcovers of improving Swedish sociological studies?

"I'm thinking of Grendel's mother," he admitted ruefully. "The Angelina Jolie version."

"Your thoughts are already as clear as a glass of Valerian quadruple-proof liquor to me, Dr. Hofstadter" said Karen briskly. "Dr. Cooper's mind, however, is as well shielded as I would have expected of an entity stable at the third level of stress."

Leonard blinked at her. "I'm not sure what system you're using to calibrate levels of stress, but his mind's not stable if there's the wrong kind of soda in the lunchroom machine."

"I prefer to drink Mr. Pibb on Tuesdays," said Sheldon. "Miss Kinnison, could I please have a closer look at the lenticular structure of your bracelet?"

"I can do better than that," said Karen with a dauntless grin. "How would you like one of your own?"

Sheldon looked small-boyish and pensive, and hugged his knees under the blanket. "Boys don't wear jewellery," he said. "Not in Texas. Meemaw explained that to me when I was three."

"And now I'm not in one of Wolowitz's dreams any more, I'm in one of my own lactose-intolerance-induced nightmares," said Leonard. "Wake me if we end up in Raj's head and there's a Bollywood dance sequence." He shut the door behind him.

"What a strange little man," said Karen without interest. "Dr. Cooper. It will of course be apparent to a person of your intellect that I have come here because your talents are needed to save the future of three galaxies."

Sheldon nodded. "Why didn't you say so?" he said chidingly. "I've been expecting this for years." He got out of bed, keeping a finicking distance between his own body and Karen's, and retrieved a suitcase from under the bed. "Can you expand on the nature of the crisis?"

"I'll brief you in a moment, Dr. Cooper." Karen swayed pneumatically towards him. "To show I'm of good will and in earnest, I'll speak to you in the most starkly fundamental language there is."

"Of course," said Sheldon, adding another three t-shirts and a laptop to the contents of the suitcase. "Physics."

Karen looked slightly taken aback, but nodded. "Indeed. Physics."

"You show me the equations for one of your culture's major achievements..."

"The Bergholm inertialess drive?" Karen whispered.

"As you will. And I shall complete them."

What a man! As she watched him complete the equations on the whiteboard, Karen Kinnison felt something that she had never felt before in all the adventures of her life - the desire to join in a wide-open two-way mind-link. It was true that she'd envisaged the object of her quest as having rather broader shoulders and a stronger chin, something more like her brother Kit, but those, she told herself, were merely the natural and understandable consequences of having grown up knowing only one male person who could be described as belonging to her own race.

"On the beam and on the green, Dr. Cooper," she breathed to herself through softly parted red lips, "_all_ the way."

"I suppose by that you mean that my equations are correct," said Sheldon. "And now, if you would tell me more about this crisis? I need to know what to pack."

"Just a packet of cigarettes and a slipstick," said Karen, leaning across to put a hand on his arm. "Did I tell you I had a twin sister? And two more sisters, also twins, a year our junior? They all wanted to come and meet you, so we played cards, and I won."

Leonard, who had opened his door, murmured the single disgusted word "Wolowitz" and closed it again.

Karen explained the hard-as-dureum facts of the matter: that she and her sisters could no more accept mere humans as mates than a Palainian could mate with a Radeligian oglon; that Sheldon, as he must have guessed by his lack of interest in Tellurian females, was similarly made; that given the force, drive, scope, range, power and above all absolute integrity of his mentation, the solution... was starkly logical.

"And our children will be the moral and physical guardians of a universe yet to come," she said, sitting down in Sheldon's seat on the couch and patting the seat beside her invitingly. "So, Slick... how about it?"

When Leonard got up the next morning, Sheldon was still sitting in the wrong seat on the couch, in his pyjamas, with a suitcase at his feet. He was staring straight ahead at the breakfast bar and quivering gently.

Leonard made a cup of coffee and folded Sheldon's nerveless fingers around it. "Where's your lady friend?" he asked.

Sheldon blinked. "This isn't my seat," he complained faintly, and shuffled himself over. "Don't, as you value your life, Leonard, so much as breathe on that whiteboard until I've finished checking the equations. I foresee a second Nobel Prize in my future."

"You haven't got the first one yet."

"Well, it's only a matter of time," said Sheldon immodestly. "What were you saying?"

"I asked about the friendly redhead you seemed to have brought home from a booth at Gen Con."

"Oh, her," said Sheldon dismissively. "I told her that there was one greater than I, one whose practical achievements outstripped my mere mastery of theory."

"You did?" said Leonard, fascinated. "Am I still dreaming?"

"I hardly know," said Sheldon coldly. "You always have that peculiar hangdog drugged look as far as I can tell. In any case, how else was I to get her to leave me alone and go and bother Wolowitz? I need to work on..." He paused. A faraway smile curved his lips. "On the _Cooper_-Bergholm inertialess space drive."


End file.
